Lisbon, 27 feb ( EFE).-the Ministry of health Portugal assured today that there will be no interruption in treatment current doctors or future applied in the National service ( SNS) health, despite the fact that the pharmaceutical company Roche decided to suspend their sales on credit to 23 public hospital in the country.
“The NHS will find alternative solutions, even with other distributors,” said today in a statement the Ministry, whose owner is Paulo Macedo.
Public medical centres will continue to offer, “always to be justified”, drugs from Roche, according to the statement.
Furthermore, the pharmaceutical company reported today a note in Portugal in which it expresses its intention to suspend loans to 23 hospitals in the Portuguese public network with arrears in the payment of debts exceeding 500 days.
The Swiss multinational, whose main Portugal area is Oncology, recalled that NHS centres owed him more than 135 million euros – apart from the interests of delay priced at around 6 million – and have an average delay of 420 days.
Company, which justified the decision by the implementation of a new trade policy, pointed out that in some cases they exceed the 1,000 days “in clear breach of the payment period of 60 days”, and commented that it will ensure the sale of medicines only to units that meet the payments in time.
The Ministry of health luso asserted that the pharmaceutical benefited “years” of hundreds of millions of euros in profits thanks to the NHS, so considered the attitude of the company “reprehensible”.
“Even more at a height that the country is in great debt situation and a historic effort to overcome the financial crisis”, adds the Ministry, which ensured that drugs will be paid “in time”.
The last December, the Portuguese pharmaceutical industry quantified at € 1.2 billion debt owed by public hospitals in the country and specified that the average repayment period stood at 450 days.
The financial situation of the Portuguese public health is one of the main concerns of the Portuguese Government, which should drastically reduce its deficit in exchange for receiving the whole of a loan of EUR 78,000 million last may by the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
To clean up the sector, the Portuguese conservative Executive already climbed more than double rates Portuguese users pay for public health, with the goal of raising around 100 million euros.
According to official data, the Ministry of health until September 2011 accumulated approximately 2.4 billion euros of debt with arrears of more than 90 days, about half of the total commitments of the Portuguese State in this period. EFE
